Small business chat – Dominic Irons

26Aug

I’m pretty excited this morning, because here’s an interview with the representative of a brand I very much like and use regularly, and which anyone interested in stationery is going to love, Bureau Direct. I’ve been indulging my passion for ink pens and unusual coloured inks with them for a couple of years now and was thrilled to find they are the people behind a bricks-and-mortar shop I loved way back when! I’ve got a bit of a “thing” about European and Japanese notebooks – the ones with squared or – even better – dotted paper, and they make buying this a lot easier than going overseas! Anyway, rather than me ranting on about it, a) go and have a peek for yourselves, and b) let’s meet Dominic!

Hello, Dominic! What’s your business called? When did you set it up?

The business is called Bureau Direct although it was originally called just Bureau. We still call it Bureau ourselves but since going online 10/15 years ago we realised that Bureau was not such an easy name. Bureau Direct was an online presence and the name has sort of stuck since that is what people see.
The business was originally set up by my mother and sister – Kathy and Jo – back in 1995, as a shop. It had a bit of a cult following, since it offered smart, stylish and slightly exotic (back then!) stationery from far-flung places like France. The shop was between Leicester Square and Covent Garden and was something of a destination store, a place to stop by and see what was new.

My involvement came a few years in to try to get us online (this was real dot.com boom time). The business had been taken over by investors who briefly expanded to 5 shops in and around London. When they pulled out at the end of 2000 the business was left in the lurch and collapsed. We, as a family, decided to buy the business back out of receivership as we felt it had potential.

We did go online a few years later, and soon realised that our future lay online not in bricks and mortar. The shop was sold and so we became an online-only business back in 2004.

What made you decide to set up your own business?

I’ll have to answer on their behalf here as technically I didn’t set it up. I think both were at a point where they had jobs that had either come to an end or were looking for a change. My mum ran a successful small retail business back in the 70s and my early memories are full of that – a homeware business with shops in Camden Town and Islington.

My involvement came at a time when I was frustrated in my job at British Airways, feeling slightly lost in a huge company with no real sense of what my role in it was for, plus the politics of big companies. When I left and joined Bureau it was such a change and nice to feel that my role had a direct impact on the outcome.

What made you decide to go into this particular business area?

Stationery was felt to be an area that had real potential as the UK market was just dull and uninspiring. Stationery was so much better even just across the channel let alone further afield. The way stationery has changed since then validates this, and there has been a real explosion of demand and choice over the past 5-10 years. An antidote to the digital world.

I love that, and it’s very true! Had you run your own business before?

No, never before. It was a difficult time and a very steep learning curve for me personally. In fact, it has continued to be a steep curve as I often feel like I am learning so much, and wonder why I didn’t know that before.

How did you do it? Did you launch full-time, start off with a part-time or full-time job to keep you going … ?

As I took over in such unusual circumstances, I was already working full-time and just continued.

What do you wish someone had told you before you started?

So much! We did try to bring in an outside person soon after buying the company back, to help act as a sort of mentor and although a couple of people we knew did briefly become involved, they had other commitments and it didn’t work out. It was always a regret of mine that we didn’t manage to make that work early on as I do wonder how things might have turned out with their involvement. I think they would have brought an experienced business mind to the table, been more prepared to take difficult business decisions and ask more demanding questions early on that could have better shaped where the business went in that phase. The years from 2001 to 2004, when we finally sold the shop and went online only, were a very difficult few years.

What would you go back and tell your newly entrepreneurial self?

Go and do a crash course in business management, and better understand the nature of the business you are running (in my case a retail business).

What do you wish you’d done differently?

Been more ruthless at seeing what worked, what didn’t and focusing the business on its strengths rather than its legacy parts that did eventually get dealt with anyway. I don’t think we could have gone online much earlier as the demand and technology were not quite ready but I wish we had better understood some of the differences of trading online in the early years.

What are you glad you did?

Go online! It was what I had joined to do and I always think it slightly amusing that I worried we were a late arrival to going online, when now we feel like old-timers! Still, going online in the period from 2001 to 2003 was a strange time – the dot.com bubble had burst, enthusiasm had waned a bit and demand had yet to actually arrive to make it a serious activity. I think the history of broadband take-up will show that sometime around that period in 2003-2005 there was a tipping point and with that so it meant that online shopping was a serious prospect for all. Once that happened, so the marketplace for an online shop just grew and grew. And still is growing.

What’s your top business tip?

Get the right balance between the numbers and a gut feeling. If you are too numbers based then you are in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees, head buried in an Excel spreadsheet. If you rely too much on what you believe is right then however good your instincts you will be at odds with what is really happening.

I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule but for most of us a good balance of these two will go a long way.

How has it gone since you started? Have you grown, diversified or stayed the same?

After going online and then deciding that the business should be online only we have probably kept to a similar core business since. We have grown, considerably and consistently, since then but it has been slow and organic and with adapting to the changing world of online retailing. But the core of what we do now is the same as what we were doing 10 years ago. Even online there is a physical process that is required to get orders into customers hands and that just evolves gradually.

BONUS QUESTION: What question would you like to ask other small business owners?

How did you cope with your worst situation (and what was it)?

Where do you see yourself and your business in a year’s time?

We have made a lot of changes to how to run the business, taking out a lot of unnecessary costs and so in a year’s time I would hope that we are considerably stronger for these changes. In the short term they caused some problems, notably with the digital marketing side, but it will all be positive in the long run.

I loved reading all about how Bureau Direct started and grew – I don’t email people and demand that they do an interview with me very often, and I’m glad I did! I love Dominic’s comment about stationery being an antidote to the digital (in the middle of an interview about a retail website in particular!) – I keep records in books and write my book reviews in a journal, and it certainly balances all the screen stuff. Do pop over and have a look at the website – quite different from our last stationery interview, you’ll find delicious notebooks, pens to suit all budgets (how many pens does it take to become a collector?) and inks in every colour you can imagine.

2 responses to “Small business chat – Dominic Irons”

My worst situation, of course, was the likely one: not having enough clients early on. Hell, even tho’ I now have more clients, and certainly a more regular flow of clients today, I’m never as busy as I want to be with book design. What kept me sane–and I highly recommend this, tho’ it’s simply not doable for many people (they have lives and continue to want to have lives, for instance)–was what I call “freelancing with a net”.
Now, there are differences, of course, with someone selling physical objects–book design and layout is more of a service, even tho’ there’s a tangible product at the very end … after printing–but having full-time employment relieves a lot of anxiety when you’re building a business and the income isn’t there. I was very fortunate in that I had been working in civil service—I was a clerk in New York State’s court system—for eight years before began my book design practice.
So I was already secure insofar as our bills pretty much being paid on time. My wife was working, too, also in the courts–although, interestingly, long before I knew her, she was a graphic artist. She was very supportive, if a tad apprehensive, at times at my late-night hours when I was working a book project. It definitely wouldn’t have worked, my book design practice would not have survived and thrived without my wife’s support.
The kicker to being employed while I grew my business was that I had a job that provided great time off, solid medical benefits (tho’ I had to contribute a significant amount toward insurance), and a pension at the end of the rainbow. I was able to retire from the day job about a year-and-three-quarters ago, after over 32 years. I collect my pension and about the minimum amount of social security. But together we’re doing a little better than when I worked the 9-to-5, plus we have the proceeds from my book design and layout projects.
I realize I’ve been most fortunate and that not everyone can expect such great, good luck. But to the extent that someone is young enough and has time to make a plan, I can wholeheartedly recommend the route I took. The one proviso I can think of is that the business you go into on top of having a full-time job must be one that you really enjoy. I love making books and that was the final piece that turned my puzzle into a most beautiful picture for my wife and me.

Great interview! If Dominic reads this comment he will know it all to be true as I, Rebecca Jay, MD of Dodo Pad, know his back story about the business from even before he was involved – there is some long term ‘family’ history…so it was fun to read the interview from that perspective at the very least.

As a small business owner myself, publishing diaries, calendars as well as organisers and other stationery, Bureau supported our own launch in 1996 in that iconic store near Leicester Square and we expanded alongside them in the early years. We were early to the online world and our own development since then mirrors Bureau’s in a number of ways. The main difference is that as a publisher we rely on the distribution of our titles in both bricks and mortar and online environments and the growth of Amazon from 2008 had a major impact on how customers (and ours have tended to be very loyal) purchased and continue to purchase.

It has been over 20 years of interesting and challenging times but the willingness to evolve with the times (remember we are also called ‘Dodo’ Pad!) is crucial to staying the course.

I’m not sure I can limit my worst situation down to a single experience but I can honestly say that the worst have been when printers have not produced according to the agreed spec. When you believe that your bulk production copies WILL match the verification copies you’ve signed off on and they don’t, that is gutting and hugely time consumptive at the expense of running and developing a business. At least as a retailer if the stock is faulty you can send it back. With a printer, when you are dealing with dated products that have a time limit on their saleability and the problem cannot be sorted quickly, whilst you may not pay for the goods effectively you lose revenue against those lost goods.

So if you would like to interview someone whose brand strapline is ‘low-tech organisation in a high-tech world’ you will see that we are very much on the same lines of thinking as Bureau!